1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate in general to network management software. More specifically, the embodiments of the invention relate to methods and systems for emulation of an Internetwork Operating System (IOS) device.
2. Description of the Background Art
There has been a tremendous growth in the area of internetworking over the past few decades. IOS devices are network management devices that are driven by Internerwork operating system (IOS). Exemplary IOS include CISCO Internetwork Operating System (IOS) and CATalyst Operating System (CATOS). IOS further includes a Command Line Interface (CLI) to manage network management devices.
New IOS devices are introduced in the market to meet the growing demands of network management. However, the network management software is rarely ready when a new IOS device is released in the market.
Many players are attempting to solve the problem of network management of IOS devices using extensible Markup Language (XML). In conventional techniques, IOS commands are emulated and stored in an ASCII format. The stored commands are then used for modeling the IOS commands for a new device. However, in conventional techniques, the entire command is written as a single line. The command is loaded in memory and parser as a linear list, with each node in the list being the entire command. This format makes the storing and loading of commands a difficult and time-consuming process, since there are usually millions of commands. Moreover, the amount of data that is required to be loaded is very large in the case of the linear list.
Furthermore, conventional techniques require users who want to learn new devices to manually enter all the commands and then capture the response to the entire command string. Therefore, the user is required to type all the commands that are required to be simulated. This makes conventional systems unfeasible and difficult to scale, since there are millions of commands.
Further, conventional methods do not allow pieces and fragments of commands to be learned and modeled, as required, in certain cases.